The others all chuckled. Now that they were finished with school, it was easy to be amused by the regulations that they had all lived by as children. “I was late once,” Claire told them, “because a groundskeeper sliced his hand when he was pruning the bushes over by the central offices. I stopped and watched while they bandaged him and took him off to the infirmary for stitches.
“I used to hope I’d be assigned Nursing Attendant,” she added.
There was an awkward silence for a moment. Claire wasn’t certain if they knew her background. Undoubtedly there had been some explanation given for her sudden appearance at the Hatchery, but probably they had been told no details. To have failed at one’s Assignment—to be reassigned—had something of a shame to it. No one would ever mention it, if they did know. No one would ask.
“Well, the committee knows best,” Edith commented primly as she passed sandwiches around. “Anyway, there’s an element of nursing at the Hatchery. All the labs and procedures.”
Claire nodded.
“Hatchery wouldn’t have been my first choice,” a tall young man named Eric said. “I was really hoping for Law and Justice.”
“My brother’s there,” Claire told him.
“Does he like it?” Eric asked with interest.
Claire shrugged. “I guess so. I never see him. He was older. Once he finished his training, he moved away from our dwelling. He might even have a spouse by now.”
“You’d know that,” Rolf pointed out. “You see the Spouse Assignments at the Ceremony.
“I’ve applied for a spouse,” he added, grinning. “I had to fill out about a thousand forms.”
Claire didn’t tell them that she had not attended the last two ceremonies. Birthmothers did not leave their quarters during their years of production. Claire had never seen a Vessel until she became one. She had not known, until she had both experienced and observed it, that human females swelled and grew and reproduced. No one had told her what “birth” meant.
“Look!” Eric said suddenly. “The supply boat’s stopping at the Hatchery. Good! I put in an order quite a while ago.” He glanced down at the riverbank, where the two youngsters were still watching the boat. “Boys!” he called. When they looked up, he pointed to the watch on his own wrist. “The school bell is going to ring in less than five minutes!”
Reluctantly they climbed back up the bank and went to retrieve their bikes. “Thank you for the reminder,” one said politely to Eric.
“You think the supply boat will still be there after school?” the other boy asked eagerly.
But Eric shook his head. “They unload quickly,” he told the boy, who looked disappointed.
“I wish I could be a boat worker,” they could hear one boy say to the other as they set their bikes upright. “I bet they go lots of places we don’t even know about. I bet if I were working on a supply boat, I’d get to see—”
“If we don’t get back on time,” his friend said nervously, “we’re not going to be assigned anything! Come on, let’s get going!”
The boys rode away toward the school building in the distance.
“I wonder what he thought he’d get to see, as a boat worker,” Rolf commented. They began to tidy up the picnic and to pack away the uneaten food.
“Other places. Other communities. The boats must make a lot of stops.” Eric folded the napkins and placed them in the basket.
“They’d all be the same. What’s so exciting about seeing a different hatchery, a different school, a different nurturing center, a different—”
Edith interrupted them. “It’s pointless to speculate,” she said in her terse, businesslike tone. “Accomplishes nothing. ‘Wondering’ is very likely against the rules, though I suppose it isn’t a serious infringement.”
Eric rolled his eyes and handed Rolf the basket. “Here,” he said. “Strap this on your bike and take it back, would you? I have to do an errand. I told the lab chief that I’d pick up some stuff at the Supply Center.”
Rolf, attaching the basket to his bike by its transportation straps, commented, “It might be nice to travel on the river, though, just for the trip. Fun to see new things. Even,” he added facetiously, “if you haven’t wondered about them.”
Edith ignored that.
“Could be dangerous,” Eric pointed out. “That water’s deep.” He looked around, making sure they had collected everything. “Ready to go back?” Claire and Edith nodded and moved their bikes to the path. Eric waved and rode off on his errand.
Even if it might be against the rules, some kind of infringement (it would be hard to know without studying the thick book of community regulations, though it was always available on the monitor in the Hatchery lobby, but there were pages and pages of very small print, and no one ever bothered to look at it, as far as Claire could tell), there would be no way for anyone to get caught in the act of wondering, Claire thought. It was an invisible thing, like a secret. She herself spent a great deal of time at it . . . wondering.
Pedaling back, she rehearsed in her mind, silently, how easy it would be to say in a casual voice, “I have to run an errand.” How she could slip away—it wouldn’t take long—and ride over to the Nurturing Center, to find Sophia and ask some questions.
Four
Then the occasion came.
“I just realized that the biology teacher never returned the posters I let him use,” Dimitri said irritably at lunch. “And I’ll need them tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll go get them,” Claire offered.
“Thanks.” The lab director nodded in her direction. “That’s a help. There will be a group of volunteers starting indoctrination, and the visual aids make things easier.”
They were eating in the Hatchery cafeteria, six of them at the same table. There was no assigned seating, and today Claire, balancing her tray of prepared food, had made her way to an empty chair at this table where the director was already sitting with several technicians. He was talking about a set of demonstration posters that he liked to use when there were visitors being given a tour of the facility. The biology teacher had borrowed them and they had not yet been returned.
“Notify the school. They’ll have a student bring them.” One of the technicians had finished eating and was tidying his tray. “And they’ll chastise the teacher,” he added, with a malicious chuckle, as he stood.